Alexander Dubcek grew up in a Kyrgyz commune before leading the Prague Spring
The man who promised socialism with a human face spent his boyhood in an idealistic workers' cooperative in what is now Bishkek. In 1968 Alexander Dubcek loosened communist rule in Czechoslovakia so boldly that half a million Warsaw Pact troops rolled in. Two decades later he was back, presiding over parliament after the Velvet Revolution.
Dubcek was born on 27 November 1921 in Uhrovec, in today's Slovakia. When he was three his family moved to the Soviet Union and joined Interhelpo, a utopian cooperative whose members spoke the invented languages Esperanto and Ido, in Kyrgyzstan; they found little more than old barracks. In 1938, told they must give up Czechoslovak citizenship to stay, they went home instead. At 17 he joined the banned Slovak Communist Party, and in 1944 he fought in the Slovak National Uprising, where he was wounded and his brother killed.
He rose steadily as a party official and studied in Moscow from 1955 to 1958, where friends told him, months late, of Khrushchev's secret speech exposing Stalin's crimes. Back home, work on commissions reviewing earlier political trials showed him the machinery of repression and turned him toward reform. In 1963 he took over the Slovak party, rehabilitating people wrongly convicted and reviving Slovak cultural anniversaries.
In January 1968 he became leader of the national party, and the Prague Spring brought rapid cultural and economic liberalisation. Party hardliners and Soviet-bloc neighbours feared the example. On the night of 20 to 21 August, Warsaw Pact troops invaded, meant to clear the way for a conservative takeover that never materialised because no credible replacement existed and Dubcek was hugely popular. The reforms were rolled back anyway; he was forced out in April 1969 and expelled from the party in 1970, in a purge that removed almost two-thirds of the 1968 membership.
He stayed out of high politics but inspired reform communists abroad, and Andrei Sakharov credited the Prague Spring as a prelude to the peaceful revolutions of 1989. That year Dubcek became chairman of the federal parliament and won the Sakharov Prize. He died after a car crash in 1992, when many expected him to become president of the new Slovakia.
Source: Alexander Dubček
